Okay, so actually I fell asleep after dinner. It did feel good to put in some substantial zzz’s after a few weeks of getting 2 hours less than I need, night after night. My secret? I finally got so tired that fatigue overtook the adrenaline that had been keeping me up. This brings me back to my college and grad studies to the work that Hans Selye did on biological adaptation to stress. He was actually the scientist who coined the term “stress”. One of the ways he studied it was to stress out lab rats. (I’m not going to tell you how he did it because I don’t remember and plus I don’t want my cancer blog to turn into an animal rights blog. Okay, well you know that I can’t resist Googling it just now. Stress was applied in various ways. Let’s just say that experiments were made.) When the rats were initially adapting to the stress they ran around and around in circles, high on adrenalin, until they just flopped over, pooped out.

So that was me, flopped over and pooped out. But I got a good night’s sleep out of it. Being a lab rat is not so bad.

George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is now Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society (cnms.berkeley.edu).